Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Microsoft is now spending $300 million to counter Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads. Does Linux need its own ad campaign? It has been fascinating to see Microsoft roll out its (can you believe it!!) $300 million ad campaign, the one that counters the now famous and effective “I’m a Mac” ads. With those ads, the Apple folks have done a great job of defining a narrative for Microsoft and, in the parlance of advertising, affecting their brand image. The top dog at Microsoft for managing the brand image of Windows said “[Apple has] made a caricature out of the PC.” Given the stakes in the marketplace, Microsoft had little choice but to invest a ton of resources and get their own message out into the public realm.

Ever wondered why your new computer feels sluggish -- or afraid you'll blow your overclocked processor to smithereens? The Inquisitor testing platform wraps the best of open source benchmarking tools in special scripts to help you test and diagnose your hardware. It's simple to use for desktop users, and if you are a computer reseller or vendor, you can also use it to stress-test thousands of computers simultaneously before shipping them off. Inquisitor, originally developed by ALT Linux and released under GNU GPL in mid-2007, is a set of shell scripts that wrap around popular open source tools such as Bonnie++, IOzone, UnixBench, and BYTEmark.

In my last article on this topic, I gave a detailed description how I activated the update-notifier process on a non-privileged user's desktop. I fully expected to see updates notices appear on that desktop as I had on the older 6.06 version. After an extended period no update icon appeared, I became suspicious. I ran some tests that indicated, indeed, no updates were needed. Hence, I was given a false sense of confidence, when the reality was I ran the wrong tests. I later learned that while I had seen the update-notifier running as a process once, it was not active on the unprivileged user's desktop upon a fresh startup. Therefore, my efforts were ineffective.

One commonly-stated barrier to Linux adoption is that it looks different to the regular computer environment people are used to. Yet, one of the strengths of Linux over other operating systems is that its user interface can be totally replaced to suit any occasion. Here is how to trick it out like MacOS's Leopard, and trick your friends.

HTC's G1, the first Android phone, is a solid competitor to the iPhone, writes columnist Rob Enderle. It's not perfect -- it lacks support for Microsoft Exchange -- but it's close. Apple's notebook upgrades also meet with his approval.

Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Mobile Firefox alpha release. The project, which is codenamed Fennec, aims to bring the desktop Firefox browsing experience to mobile devices like MIDs and phone handsets. This early alpha release delivers a compelling user interface and demonstrates the impressive scope of the browser's potential on diminutive devices, but suffers from performance limitations and instability that reflect the need for significant refinement before it's mature enough for mainstream adoption.

Almost one year ago, LWN examined the GCC plugin mechanism - or, more exactly, the lack of such a mechanism. Despite the increasing level of interest in adding special-purpose modules to the GCC compiler, GCC has no API which allows this addition to be done. So developers working on GCC extensions are faced with the daunting prospect of patching their code directly into the compiler. This situation looked unlikely to change; the Free Software Foundation's fears that a plugin mechanism would be used by proprietary extensions was just too strong. One year later, though, things look a little different; there may be a plugin-capable GCC available in the (relatively) near future.

It was a good week for Linux last week, as it began its 18th year with two significant coups. Generating the most excitement, perhaps, was the long-awaited release on Wednesday of Adobe Flash Player 10, now available -- for the first time ever -- in a variety of convenient packaging formats for Linux.

I attended Openmind last week, an interesting conference organized by the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions (COSS) to bring together open source professionals, community members and academics in Finland. In the session about business aspects of open source, in which I gave a talk about FOSS Governance, Nina Helander and Mikko Rönkkö presented the preliminary results of the National Software Industry Survey 2008.

Mandriva Linux 2009 took the centre stage during last week as many Linux users had a chance to install and check out the latest and greatest from the company that recently celebrated 10 years of existence. The reports varied widely, ranging from praise for the excellent way KDE 4 was integrated into the distribution to outright recommendations to skip this release due to a surprisingly high number of bugs. In other words, it's the story of Linux distributions - they will work great on one combination of hardware, but will fail miserably on another. In the news section, Debian presents updated artwork for "Lenny", Linux Mint releases its first stable 64-bit edition, the developers of KPackageKit introduce a new universal way of managing software, and K12LSTP Linux, a Fedora-based distribution for thin servers and clients, becomes K12Linux. Finally, don't miss the latest entrant into the world of BSD-based live CDs - BSDanywhere, or OpenBSD with Enlightenment.

Can I begin with a few disclaimers? I believe that people who create things deserve to be rewarded for their efforts. Which means that I think that stealing entertainment and software is wrong. Actually, come to think of it, if there was a form of copy protection that was never a hassle for paying customers but which effectively prevented piracy, I might enthusiastically support it. (Go ahead, mock me if you must–I’ll wait.) With that out the way, I also believe this: Copy protection (also known in recent years as Digital Rights Management) just stinks. At its best, it creates minor but real inconveniences for the people who pay for stuff; at its worst, it badly screws up their experiences with the products they buy. Let’s just say it–the world would be better off without it.

Ah, cryptographic security: a boon to those who understand the algorithms, but all too often a lost cause to those who don't. The secure HTTPS protocol for Web surfing is widely accepted, but has one fatal flaw: users ignore certificate error warnings. A Firefox extension called Perspectives aims to close that security hole. Firefox pops up a security warning whenever it encounters an SSL certificate that doesn't match the domain name of the site on which it is found, or is self-signed. Both situations are commonplace; gmail.com, for example, uses a certificate issued for mail.google.com, and many non-commercial Web sites use self-signed certificates because they don't want to pay yearly fees to a certificate authority such as VeriSign.

LXer Feature: 19-Oct-2008

Some of the big news this week included OpenOffice.org 3.0 coming out, Dell finally starts advertising their Ubuntu offerings and Cisco and Microsoft step up their courting of Linux developers. Also, Installing DSL on your hard drive, Linux gets a seat on all of Qantas's new Airbus A380's, Wikipedia moves over to Ubuntu servers, Russia's open source revolution and Carla Schroder shows us how to do professional level photography work on Linux without going to jail.

Windows is far from being the only game in town.The Apple Mac's secure and stable OS X operating system has a fiercely loyal band of devotees, and the user-friendliness of Linux distros has persuaded many people to take advantage of a seemingly endless supply of free software. Until now, the problem has been sharing resources between the operating systems, and both Linux and OS X are traditionally seen as isolated from Windows for this reason. However, this is no longer the case. Read on to find out how to configure Linux, OS X and Windows to freely share each other's resources, and in some cases, even log into each other.

On October 22, government and private industry experts will debate the issues and opportunities presented by collaborative software development models at the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) Portland, Oregon. The distinguished panelists have direct experience with successful public/private consortiums based on the open source software model in which developers as well as business and technical users collaborate to create new applications while sharing both the costs and the benefits.

Jui Tan, a partner for BlueRun Ventures who is based in Beijing, happened to be in Silicon Valley for a meeting a couple of weeks ago when Google finally unveiled the first Android mobile phone. The international mobile market is a main focus for Tan and BlueRun. He shrugged and said:"Coming to Silicon Valley [that] week was the first time I heard about it."

Speaking at a forum here Friday, Whitehurst said the proprietary, "top-down, planned" software development model characteristic of closed source companies is coming to an end--one which is demonstrated by the number of bugs in Vista, he said. Whitehurst claimed that there are "half the number of bugs in Linux per thousand lines" compared to the Microsoft operating system, because of the open source collaborative model.

In January 2008, the KDE community celebrated the release of the much anticipated KDE 4.0 in Mountain View, CA. When the event was celebrated by a packed house, we realised that there was a strong demand for KDE events in the Americas. One year later, the community will celebrate this new conference series at Camp KDE 2009, to be held in Negril, Jamaica.

Linux will be a passenger in every seat on Qantas' Airbus A380s airplanes. All of the airline's superjumbos -- the first of which will commence flying next week -- will have their in flight entertainment systems powered by the operating system.

Mozilla Corp. late Thursday released the first public preview of its mobile browser, and the company took the unusual step of offering it in versions for desktop PCs and Macs to collect feedback. Code-named "Fennec" in a nod to the fennec fox, a small animal that lives in the Sahara Desert and is notable for its huge ears, the browser is built from the same Gecko code base that drives the also-under-construction Firefox 3.1, which just hit Beta 1 on Tuesday.